Maybe he simply doesn't know about the N800... is that his fault, or the fault of the marketing department?

Read his article. In the process of praising Apple to no end, he is making bold assertions about what products Nokia does not and can not make. His sin is one of omission. The onus is on the writer to fully research his subject before committing his work to print. Had he simply examined Nokia's product list, he would have quickly discovered the 770 and N800 tablets and saved himself some embarrassment.

Only an idiot, or someone with a highly selective agenda, would spout off in such ignorance as this writer did. Either one is worthy of skewering IMO.

That just makes you look more guilty.

Yeah, fair enough He could have done some research, but then he's not exactly John Pilger - just another rabid Apple fanboi blogger.

What is quite disturbing is that he gives credibility to the Apple store worker, as if this worker has first hand knowledge of where Apple are going in future! Does anyone believe anything Fry or BestBuy workers (Dixons and Currys in the UK) say? Certainly not! He loses his entire credibility within the first few paragraphs.

I guess this is the (lousy) art of turning marketing into information. Nothing more. pages and pages are blackened of "infomercials" trying to convince people that "our truth is your truth".

Aah, Amsterdam. Very old, but fond, memories :-)
Hope it hasn't turned into just another stupid place over the years...

Some very insightful comments in this thread (in between the usual whining)

I'd like to respond with some thoughts pertaining to unit sales, the current and future portables market and the sustained viability of ITOS platform.

First, some observations which are axiomatic to my case:

• The tablets are computers.
  
• The 800x480 screen makes many more applications possible than with previous portable devices.
  
• The PDA/PIM market is crowded with many devices, many of which have sold only tens of thousands of units.
• Windows based pda-devices exist from many vendors, and the total userbase is several orders of magnitude above that of the embedded linux userbase.
• The strength of the developer community, the diversity and quality of ITOS apps and the size of the commercial software market around ITOS and the tablets is proportional to the number of users.

What kind of product can Nokia offer that will drive enough sales to attract enough developers to make the tablet devices strong contenders in the market and ITOS a viable platform in the coming years?

It is illustrative to reflect on what made the tablets relatively successful in the first place: Nokia was first-to-market in the Internet Tablet niche, thanks largely to the unique 800x480 display. As competitor devices appear with this resolution, the tablet's unique position will dissolve into a rapidly maturing ubiquitous 'do-everything' handheld market. If the ITOS user/developer-base has not reached critical mass by this point, it will be in danger of fading into obscurity.

How can Nokia compete with a Linux device against Windows-based competitors offering similar resolution? Nokia probably can't develop market-leading PIM/Word-Processing applications on their own, and even if they did, they'd be placing it into a market crowded with competitors.

Where is an as-yet untapped niche with potential for not just tens of thousands, but millions of sales? Lets see what portable devices sell the most, next to phones:

Nintendo DS has sold 40 million units.
Sony PSP has sold at least 9 million units.

Nokia knows that kids and young adults are the biggest market for portable devices and the best target group to convince that a new class of device is 'cool' and 'must-have'. If they want to sell millions of units, show the kids something they haven't seen before - the unit that plays awesome games and has enough resolution to do the internet surfing, notetaking, chatting etc. This would be the next ground-breaking product - something not seen before.

There is no technical reason that the next tablet can not be made to be an excellent next-generation gaming device. The OMAP 3430 has the core speed and 3D graphics to outclass anything on the market today. With the linux OS and OpenGL the tablet would have extremely low barriers/costs to commercial studios to port their existing titles. From a hardware standpoint, the main requirement would be a fast 8-way dpad and buttons for the right hand; this could be in the form of a clamshell slide-on gaming-controller case, or integrated into the main case (the latter might be a design/image turn-off to the 'corporate' users).

With an OpenGL-capable system, game houses could port existing and classic PC games in weeks. By signing deals and bringing-out the do-everything tablet with big-name game titles in 2008, they could once again create a new class of portable device, but this time, with a market potential for millions of units.

Ummm. I'm 35 and I have a DS. I'm not in the N800 for game playing (Battlegewelled aside). I hope Nokia does not do the "Kids" market like the music industry has done. Kids spend other people's money. There's a whole untapped market of people who if marketed to with easy to use devices, will spend millions on whatever that product is.

The N800 doesn't have to be billed as PIM but PIM abilities are a good thing (tm). I was pretty frustrated with the device until I found a means to sync with gCalendar. I'm using Wowio and reading books on the device (surprisingly nice). The N800 is a very good product it needs marketing. If Nokia is serious about this device it needs to market the thing.

Imho, focusing on gaming would be nearly suicidal. A gaming platform is just as good as the games that are on that platform. I don't think that this a technical problem, it's a issue of content. Competing against Sony and Nintendo and Microsoft on gaming ... Basically getting developers to develop on this platform instead of the other 100% gaming focused platforms would be very difficult indeed. Even the major players have problems convincing developers to develop for them. And if the device isn't really focused to gaming, it's a jack-of-all-trades, master of none.

Porting, even if it can be done technically, isn't really feasible from the UI perspective. Games that have been developed for the desktop computer for the most part do not really work on the tablet, because of touch screen focus, no mouse, no keyboard, limited screen resolution, limited performance etc.

That is not to say that gaming isn't a good use case. I personally believe much more on "casual gaming". There probably the browser will be in the most important role: supporting Flash and similar standards. Casual gaming has a whole new set of requirements. As well as online gaming. Also efforts elsewhere in Nokia, for instance N-gage things, try to (I hope) target a new kind of gaming.

From a gaming perspective, if we could get a bluetooth mouse working (have we?) with an easy-to-toggle pointer I'd love to see some of the linux games out there get ported (Quake 3 would be particularly cool).

If we provide the means for developers to port 3d games with a minimum of hassle, we will get 3d games. It shouldn't be marketed as a gaming device, though, as that will just set it up for failure.